Implementing an open innovation strategy : lessons from Napoleon by Stuart Read and David Robertson

This article has being choosen on Emerald database looking for open innovation. Troughout this article Stuart Read and David Robertson explain how to implement an effective and efficient innovation strategy. The aim is to find a solution to an internal problem using the open market, it means, to deals with external companies. With this kind of strategy, organisation save money and time. Nowadays, a lot of companies work with the new opportunity which is internet (new marketshare) and stop with traditional ways.

In order to demonstrate the idea can be demonstrated in the following example. For that the writter convience the lecturer that open innovation is a simple idea which is call «the wisdom of the crowd». If people put their idea in common, the result is that the best idea is the most popular. Clearly, the fact is masses outperform the individualism and in the book “the Wisdom of Crowds”, James Surowiecki validate it with the example of the famous game : Who wants to be a millionaire? 91 percent of the answer provide from the audience when the playeur don’t know the right answer. Then there is the Napoleonic approach which is based on the film Napoleon Dynamite. NetFix is a movie rental firm with a huge problematic : how the company can help their customers to find the movie they like? NetFix used in 2000 already the open innovation strategy with CineMatch. This is a service based on statistic which give some recommandations about movies. But it was not very reliable. To keep their subscribers, NeFix decide to increase the accuracy of CineMatch service with a coporate strategy : post the problem to the network community.

Furthemore with this approach, NetFix assign a general view of open innovation. In this instance, NetFix offer the chance to individual or team who can create an algorithm to enhance the CineMatch system to help customers in making